Mind's Eye October/November 1977

The Mind's Eye

Volume 2 Number 2/3

NORTH ADAMS STATE COLLEGE

The Mind's Eye is a journal of review and comment
published monthly during the college year
at North Adams, Massachusetts 01247

Robert Bence 3 MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS
AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY
Business corporations with more resources
than most national governments raise
a novel problem of control

Michael Haines 6 ON HUNTING

A hunter explores himself

VERSE

Arnold Bartini 5 IMAGES FOR ORCHESTRA

October/November 1977

EDITORIAL BOARD

W- Anthony Gengarelly
Stephen A. Green
R. Michael Haines
Charles A. Mclsaac
Thomas A. Mulkeen

EDITOR

Charles A. Mclsaac

REVIEWS & NOTES

3 Cape Cod's Water Defended

4 J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ellen Schiff 5 MISS MARGARIDA'S WAY

A teacher tyrannizes the audience
at the Ambassador Theatre

Charles A. Mclsaac 7 In Brief

ASSASSINATION, NUCLEAR WAR, THE BAKKE CASE

Sarah Clarke 8 NEWSWEEK WATCH

DEPARTMENTS

Charles A. Mclsaac 2 The Editor's File

BACK TO BASICS

8 Contributors

The Mind' s Eye invites contributions. Your research, comment,
reflections, reviews, poetry, fiction are welcome.

2

The Editor's File

BACK TO BASICS
by Charles A. Mclsaac

Frank E. Armbruster ' s book Our Children's
Crippled Future: How American Education
Has Failed (Quadrangle, 197 7), which was
briefly mentioned in September's Mind ' s
Eye as a back-to- tradition treatise, got
itself roundly condemned in the Massachu-
setts Teacher (September/October) for
almost every conceivable offense. The
reviewer, George Abbott White, has no good
words for it, granting it at best an
opprobrious kind of consistency in its
"rhetorical overkill, the casual regard
for facts and their context, the perverse
mythmaking, and the feeble attempts at
scholarship." Strong words. White picks
out for special attention Armbruster' s
claim that students of the 1910s and 1930s
did better than their modern counterparts
in reading and other basic skills, as
reflected in the results of standardized
tests. Not so, says the reviewer; the
author's interpretation of the data is
defective. We who graduated from high
school in the 1930s, and remember how is
was, whisper amen.

These strictures notwithstanding, it is
nonetheless apparent that a problem
exists. The growing unease with schooling
and the spreading controversy about
so-called "basics" in education are evi-
dence of a fever which is destined to rage
as long as society perceives its educa-
tional product to be inferior. We are
obviously engulfed in a cultural process
of formidable dimensions, analysis of
which would be presumptuous in this space.
But we may ask some questions.

What, in fact, are basics in this trans-
mogrified world? Has society become so
misshapen and bizarre that traditional
values have no relevance? Can the social
vehicle be, as it were, tin-knocked back
into recognizable form and returned, with
current inspection sticker, to the high
road of Western culture? One fervently
hopes so, for the map currently available
to us shows no other route to human

fulfillment. A plausible alternative to
the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian tradition
does not present itself.

But un-success with the young makes us
wonder, as it does Armbruster and the
legions for whom he speaks. The dismaying
decline in SAT scores has resisted the
scrutiny of numerous studies. Our chil-
dren are off in the fields picking strange
flowers. How do we get them back? By
stern command? By accommodation? Neither
works well in the end result.

Is it conceivable that the accumulated
weight of twenty-five centuries of learning
is too much to bear? That its freight
cannot be delivered? Does the knowledge/
information explosion make both teaching
and learning feckless? Impossible on its
face, we say; man cannot produce more
information than he can comprehend. He
can't? This is debatable. As we advance
toward the end of the twentieth century,
it has become so hard to absorb and organ-
ize our augmented corpus of data that
instruction is taxed nearly beyond profes-
sional capacity to keep abreast, and the
task of transmitting knowledge is compli-
cated to the extent that simplification/
fragmentation techniques are seemingly
unavoidable. This runs the risk of
rupturing the skein of connected concepts
which we view as the indispensable
framework of Western civilization.

Seeing it this way, educators have prop-
erly been alarmed. Civilized man must
maintain an organic relation to his roots;
he cuts loose from them at his peril.
Harvard College is currently leading the
way back, through curriculum reform, to a
cohesive core of knowledge to which every-
one in the human family is a rightful
heir. Encapsulated, the Harvard program
proposes that an educated person entering
society from college should be acquainted
with the methods of the natural sciences,
the main forms of analysis used in the

3

social sciences, some of the important
scholarly, literary, and artistic achieve-
ments of the past, and the major religious
and philosophical conceptions of man.
Thus society, askew of late, will be re-
emplaced on its legitimate foundation.

This is well and good. But legitimacy is
one thing in college, with its selected
population, and quite another thing in the
mass culture of the high school. There,
it seems, are the greater problems: the
shaping of the tender-tough, alienated
young; the reduction of unbearable,
community-derived tensions; the leading-on
to philosophical detachment through
liberal engagement — intimacy with history,
understanding of science, the stirring of
authentic social feeling, and admiration
of art and literature as transcendent
forces. How do we do this? Can it in
fact be brought off, given the matrix from
which high school students come? Radio,
television, and motion pictures have
endowed us with a postliterate generation,
a new segment of society divorced in
significant part from the printed word and
hostile to the values we hold dear.

For the blame for this, we must look to
ourselves: we invented movies, radio, and
TV, and the commercialism which sustains
them. Our response is to provide educa-
tion in the same format: audio and video.
The bill for this is enormous, and we can-
not pay it out of income gained from
commercial messages beamed to a nation-
wide consumer audience.

We have, it seems, put ourselves in a
bind .

CAPE COD'S WATER DEFENDED

See the letter of John M. Kelly, Director
of Public Health, Town of Barnstable, in
the October Country Journal for a point-
by-point refutation of William B. Walker's
"The Poisoning of Cape Cod" (July Country
Journal , reviewed in the September Mind ' s
Ey_e) . Kelly cites studies, tests, and
facts to discredit Walker. "None of these
studies substantiate Mr. Walker's poorly
researched, ill-advised propaganda," he
writes. Country Journal disagrees.

MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS

AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

by Robert Bence

The postindustrial age caught most Ameri-
can students of politics by surprise. We
had been busily creating our various
models of political systems, with their
pressure groups, electoral games, and in-
tergovernmental relationships, and had
not noticed how national and international
politics were being shaped by economics.
While examining the comparative merits of
Jeffersonian rural republicanism and Ham-
iltonian oligarchy, we ironically ignored
the expansion of the most potentially
important political force in this century
— the development of the multinational
corporations. Of course, we all knew
corporations were powerful competitors for
government rewards, but we were unaware of
how they were beginning to be the primary
force in shaping and defining the nature
of political conflict. .

By definition multinational corporations
are very large profit-making enterprises
that have resource extraction, production,
and marketing operations in a multitude of
nation-states. U.S. multinationals domi-
nate the field, but European and Japanese
companies try harder. Statistical compar-
isons abound to astound us with the size
and complexity of these global giants.
For example, the wealth of General Motors
equals that which is at the disposal of
the French government, and Standard Oil of
New Jersey (Exxon) has a fleet of ships
which surpasses the size of the Russian
merchant marine.

If wealth is a measure of political power,
multinationals have to be considered top
potential political contenders in the
international and national arenas. An-
other index of political power is know-
ledge, and again multinationals score
well, since they command much, if not
most, of the world's technological exper-
tise. This power has had visible effects
on the less developed nations and their
unsophisticated political systems. Not
all of these effects have been beneficial,
as Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller docu-

ment in their critical work an multina-
tionals, Global Reach . The authors argue
persuasively that multinationals are not
the collective messiah of modern develop-
ment, spreading the joys of technology and
WeStern-style happiness, but instead
become undeveloping institutions that take
precious finance capital from the poor
nations, destroy — through mechanization —
more jobs than they create, and using the
best of Western television ("I Love Lucy"
reruns), sell Pepsi-Cola and Twinkles to
people whose nutrition level is already
dangerously low. The defenders of multi-
nationals, like Lee Iacocca, president of
Ford Motor Company, counter that their
global operations are the only organized
force for internationalism, and nation-
states are the basic obstacle to the major
impetus for world peace — the profit
motive. Indeed, the case can effectively
be made for the nonideological and inte-
grative nature of multinationals. Gulf
Oil is equally at home in Marxist Angola
(where Cuban troops protect Gulf's wells)
and the fascist Republic of South Africa.
Recent U.S. business overtures to the
Soviet Union lead one to ask, Is Mack
Truck winning the Cold War?

Certainly, multinationals have the tested
ability to effect political allocation of
resources in the economically desperate
regimes of the Third World. But what is
their level of political power in the land
of the free and the home of the brave?
Multinationals owe much of their growth to
deliberate public policy decisions of many
presidential administrations. Tax loop-
holes, government underwriting of insur-
ance against expropriation and other
overseas risks, government-subsidized
loans and credit for foreign trade and
investment have made it possible and de-
sirable for multinationals to spread into
more and more countries. Beginning with
the Marshall Plan, U.S. companies have
been rewarded by the U.S. taxpayer (indi-
rectly of course) for international expan-
sion. To expand upon the wisdom of Calvin
Coolidge, the business of America became
the business of the world. The effects of
this expansion are debatable, but recent
testimony before the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee indicates that the U.S.
may have lost 1,062,577 jobs between 1966

and 197 3 due to overseas expansion of U.S.
companies, and the huge amount of transfer
capital in the hands of multinationals and
their affiliated banks may be a primary
cause of the continual U.S. balance-of-
payments deficit.

The most crucial influence of the multi-
nationals on the U.S. political economy
may be a very subtle one. The fewer and
fewer multinationals who dominate more and
more of the national and world economic
systems are possibly too big for even the
U.S. government to control. These com-
panies have information, technology, and
resource and marketing operations able to
shape political priorities beyond the
imagination of Adam Smith. So when Presi-
dent Carter and James Schlesinger attenpt
to solve the energy crisis, they must deal
with the needs of the multinationals, who
know how to research, explore, and
develop. To not deal with the needs of
these companies risks short term, and
possibly long term, politico-economic
chaos. In effect, the multinationals have
defined the boundaries of political con-
flict. Because of their economic power
they cannot be seriously challenged. The
anti-oil speeches of President Carter are
rhetoric, or symbolic politics. The
government which sponsored the Sherman
Antitrust Act to curb monopolies is no
longer the controller, but the controlled.
The U.S. government finds itself in virtu-
ally the same position as that of an
underdeveloped country. The critical
questions are, then, Is the power of the
multinationals to define the scope of
politics dangerous, and does this devel-
opment require countervailing forces which
at the present time do not exist?

(For the sake of brevity I have not in-
cluded my sources, but would be glad to
share them with any interested readers.)

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Harold Green in "The Oppenheimer Case:
A Study in the Abuse of Law" ( Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists , September) examines
the guilt-by- association case which ban-
ished from public life the great physicist
who fathered the atomic bomb.

5

GOOD OLD GOLDEN RULE DAYS

by Ellen Schiff

IMAGES FOR ORCHESTRA

by Arnold Bartini

I . Brahms

Vermilion carpets

plunging marble stairwells;

pewter candelabras

igniting symmetrical shadows

in plush chambers.

II. Sibelius

Spruce tang permeating
frozen white groves;
cataracts crashing

the awesome still

of morning star.

III. Tchaikovsky
Roman candles

firing incandescent vapor trails;
ivy-clung castle walls

going under

tree shadows.

IV. Stravinsky

Inferno red sun,

ablaze with itself

victimizing tropical horizons;
anemic spectres,
dripping colorless blood
in cancer death orgies.

V. Vaughan Williams

Stark clock tower

laced against cloud ripples;

ineffable peace

of morning blue mist
before the bird stir.

MISS MARGARIDA'S WAY, a play written and
directed by Roberto Athayde. Presented by
the New York Shakespeare Festival, Joseph
Papp, producer. At the Ambassador
Theatre, 215 W. 49th St., N.Y.

It is difficult for anybody who has ever
spent any amount of time in a classroom to
remain untouched by Roberto Athayde 's Miss
Margarida's Way , a New York Shakespeare
Festival production which has just moved
uptown to the Ambassador Theatre. The
play is a tour de force for Estelle Par-
sons who is virtually alone on stage for
an hour and a half in the role of an
eighth-grade teacher. Egomaniacal (she
refers to herself mostly in the third per-
son), dictatorial, sex-starved, foul-
mouthed, and astonishingly ill-informed,
Miss Margarida's sole qualification for
classroom service is her indef atigability.
Her muddled lessons tumble one upon the
other, never finished, always ending up in
biology, a speciality Miss Margarida
claims she tutors privately, but refuses
to pursue in class, "no matter how much
you rotten punks want me to." The desul-
tory sequence of lessons Is punctuated by
an apparently endless supply of textbooks
which the teacher extracts from a tiny
cupboard drawer, only to strew them- about
the schoolroom where they lie as oppres-
sive litter reminiscent of Ionesco's
teacups and chairs.

The proliferation of dead matter is not
the only parallel between the work of that
master of absurd theatre and Athayde 1 s
play. In his chilling one-acter, The
Lesson , Ionesco demonstrates how a pro-
fessor's overzealousness in converting his
pupils to his own patterns of expression
lead him to rape and murder those stu-
dents. As that professor's philosophical
maid observes, philology leads to calam-
ity. Miss Margarida's Way also hammers
home the point that she who controls the
word controls society. "I'll write that
on the board so you can memorize it," Miss
Margarida says again and again, covering
an enormous greenboard with a potpourri

6

of misspellings and misinformation that,
she never stops emphasizing, are all re-
quired knowledge for the final exams. And
without those final exams, her students
will never, ever pass into high school;
without them, they will be barred forever
from college and from graduate school.
"And Miss Margarida wants all of you to
become doctors," she proclaims, leering at
her charges.

All of these obvious exaggerations might
be passed off as stage conventions de-
signed to amuse, were there a group of
actors in the house to portray an appar-
ently overcrowded class of eighth-graders.
But there is only one daring young man,
seated in the fifth row of the audience.
Occasionally he dashes onto stage in re-
sponse to the teacher's calls for a volun-
teer. Once there, he runs into a barrage
of humiliation and reproach which leaves
him mute and limp. It is the actual audi-
ence in the theatre which is pressed into
functioning as Miss Margarida 's students.
She threads her way through the balcony,
making sure people are in their places;
she insults latecomers exactly as an in-
sensitive . teacher might; she addresses the
audience precisely as if it were an ob-
streperous crowd of not very bright gram-
mar school kids. Indeed, Estelle Parsons
makes her second act entrance through the
lobby, angrily shooing theatregoers back
to their seats and screaming recrimina-
tions at those who have used the "recess"
to decorate the stage greenboard with
entirely appropriate graffiti.

Plays often work by making their audiences
draw on some shared historical awareness.
This play uses that devise with unremit-
ting, deadly aim. Shortly after Miss
Margarida 's first entrance, she assures
her students that she knows exactly how
they feel. They are as inextricably
trapped in that classroom as they are in
life. "How many of you were consulted
about your own birth?" she asks, reminding
the spectator of his own years in school-
rooms where, it seemed to him, everything
of immediate interest and relevance was
eclipsed by a colossus of information he
was told he must master in the prescribed
manner, and where he as individual became
fodder in the mass to be processed through

the grades.

That the play reawakens those memories is
eloquently demonstrated by the increasing
enthusiasm with which the audience plays
its role. Early in the first act, it
dutifully parrots the preposterous anthem
Miss Margarida teaches it; by the second
act, having had a chance to vandalize the
classroom during intermission, it dares to
pelt her with jeers, spitballs, and paper
airplanes .

It Is not just New York audiences who re-
spond to Miss Margarida' s Way. Since
1971, the play has been produced fifty-
five times in more than twenty languages.
This scathing portrayal of compulsory edu-
cation is the work of a young man who, at
the age of twenty-one, had acquired enough
of a career as a school dropout in his
native Brazil, in France, and in the
United States to speak out with authority
and compelling conviction. It might be
tempting to debate Roberto Athayde's per-
ceptions. It would be foolhardy to
ignore them.

ON HUNTING
by Michael Haines

For me, fall jLs the harvest season. There
is something very comfortable in the cy-
clical changes: I could never stand to
live in California or Florida or Hawaii —
I seem to need the security of the
seasonal flow.

And the part of the cycle I feel now is
the harvesting mood. At this time of
year, I usually lament that I didn't put
in more garden. I savor the fall family
outing to pick apples. I really miss the
ripening corn and wheat fields of my na-
tive Midwest, but I am compensated some-
what by Sew England's spectacular foliage.

However, the real harvest that stirs me
at this time of year is the same one that
excites my Brittany Spaniel. I watch him
sniff the breeze that swirls the leaves
around his doghouse, and I feel it, too.
It's in our blood, I guess: by nature,

7

I'm as much a hunter as he is.

To my more civilized colleagues in the
academy, my longing for the hunt must seem
a strange and unbecoming barbarity. But I
come from a subculture where hunting was
as natural a harvesting activity as pick-
ing corn, "combining" wheat, or butchering
pigs. True, I have come a long way — geo-
graphically and spiritually— from that
Ohio farm country. And 1 agree with Wolfe
that I can't go home. The New England
woods, though, seem to draw me as natu-
rally as the Ohio fields and fence rows
once did.

And it seems to me that it's more than
just the hunting experiences of my youth
that draws me. It is, I think,
centuries — millenia, perhaps — of racial
memory; it really is akin to the stirrings
in my spaniel who was bred to be a hunter.

One could argue that my longing is simply
the result of enculturation or tradition.
I began to hunt because my father did, his
father took him, and I suppose my grand-
father's father took him. The cycle con-
tinues: I took my son hunting for the
first time this" year. And so it goes.

One could argue that hunting derives its
importance from its role in history. Jose
Ortega y Gasset, a twentieth-century Span-
ish philosopher, in his essay "Meditations
on Hunting," has noted that in the history
of Western man two activities have domi-
nated his leisure time — dancing and
hunting. Something made hunting a prior-
ity — possibly its value in keeping the
warrior class in fighting condition.
(NRA types still use this rather specious
defense . }

One could argue — and I think I would — that
there really is "something in the blood,"
or to use more modern terminology, there
is still in our genetic inheritance a rem-
nant of the hunting instinct that once was
a necessity for our very survival. Robert
Ardrey's most recent book, The Hunting
Hypothesis , argues eloquently and fairly
convincingly that hunting was a crucial
development in our evolution.

Whatever the origin of my "primitive stir-

rings" — whether a deeply ingrained part of
my racial unconscious, a continuation of
a long history of a popular leisure activ-
ity, or simply the passing on of a family
tradition — I feel those longings every
year at this time. And I choose not to
suppress those longings. The continuation
of the hunting cycle is as satisfying and
as comforting as the cycle of the sea-
sons — and, I think, just as natural.

In B rief

HO PLOT AGAINST JFK

"An arrow launched into the air to kill a
foreign leader may well have fallen back
to kill our own," writes Daniel Schorr in
"The Assassins" ( New York Review of Books ,
October 13). Schorr, the former CBS
correspondent, exhaustively reviews the
evidence of CIA plots against Castro's
life and 'the clues to a plot to assassin-
ate John F. Kennedy. The facts appear to
prove the CIA was heavily involved in
efforts to dispose of Castro. But there
is no proof of an overt Cuban conspiracy
against the American president. Neverthe-
less, Lee Harvey Oswald, deeply disaffect-
ed by U.S. actions against Castro, may
well have been sensitized by Castro's
retaliatory protests into a kind of mental
conspiracy against Kennedy. Schorr's
theory: "The 'conspiracy," then, would
have been a conspiracy of interlocking
events — the incessant CIA plots to kill
Castro, touching off a Castro warning,
touching off something in the fevered
mind of Lee Harvey Oswald."

THE WAR TO COME

In "Lest We Forget: The Thoughts of Three
Nobel Laureates on War and Peace" ( Bulle -
tin of the Atomic Scientists , September)
Philip Noel-Baker, Alfred Kastler, and
Sean MacBride speculate on the future
nuclear war. For each, the key to the
real probabilities is the growth of arma-
ments budgets in all nations, large and
small. MacBride: "Another fantasy,
against which we must be on guard, is the
idea that responsible governments will
never use nuclear energy for war purposes.

8

They have used it once, so how can we sit
back and expect that they will not use it
in the future?" Kastler: "There is no
need to be a great scholar or great
prophet to see that the human race is
rushing toward its suicide." Noel-Baker:
"I am going to submit that there is really
only one major problem before mankind,
that is, to demilitarize the governments
and societies of the world. We must
release the resources wasted on what is
now called defense, when there is no
defense, to solve our other problems.

RIGHTS OF THE OPPRESSED

Two articles on the celebrated Bakke case
merit particular attention. Extended
treatment is accorded in HcGeorge Bundy's
"The Issue Before the Court: Who Gets
Ahead in America?" ( Atlantic , November) .
Says Bundy : "Ho one is arguing for the
admission of the unqualified, and there is
no finding in Bakke that such admissions
have occurred. , . . The question is much
more subtle: Among the qualified, how
shall we choose?" Bundy's essay is
important because it presents the position
of the Ford Foundation — of which he is
president — which has invested $150 million
over ten years in support of affirmative
action in undergraduate, graduate, and
professional schools.

A close sociolegal analysis by Ronald
Dworkin, author of Taking Rights Seriously
(Harvard, 1977), is offered in "Why Bakke
Has No Case" in the New York Review of
Books of November 10. From the accepted
premise that American society is racially
conscious — we have a history of slavery,
repression, and prejudice — Dworkin devel-
ops a brief for affirmative action. The
dissolution of racism depends on our
ability to integrate oppressed minorities
into the professions by "allowing the fact
of their race to count affirmatively as
part of the case for admitting them."
Bakke 's argument, that he should not be
excluded from medical school because of
his race alone, is rejected on the ground
that there is no history of prejudice or
contempt toward the white race to which
Mr. Bakke belongs.

— Charles A. Mclsaac

NEWSWEEK WATCH

Samples of Sarah Clarke's Newsweek Watch.
The full version is at the library desk.

"The Middle Class Poor." September 12,
pp. 30-34. Trying to live up to the
middle-class expectations of the '50s and
'60s, many Americans have gone into debt.

"A Sense of Mortality." September 26,
pp. 74-78. The sudden death of poet
Robert Lowell is marked by a sensitive,
thoughtful obituary by Jack Kroll.

"Sputnik Plus 20: The U.S. on Top."
October 10, pp. 52-67. Moscow bureau
chief Fred Coleman, with associated corre-
spondents, investigated the state of sci-
ence, medicine, and education in the U.S.
and Russia, discovering that the U.S.
remains technologically superior in each.

"At Long Last, Love." October 24, pp.
80-85. The phenomenon of reversed-age
couples, long familiar in the older man/
younger woman relationship, is beginning
to show an older woman/younger man trend.

Contributors

Arnold Bartini, Assistant Professor of
English, has a lifelong interest in the
work of Robert Frost.

Robert Bence, Assistant Professor of
History and Political Science, is a
student of American public policy.

Sarah Clarke is Head of the Circulation
Department and Librarian of the Teacher
Resources Center in the college library,

Michael Haines, Assistant Professor of
English, is a specialist in medieval
literature and a freelance journalist.

Charles A. Mclsaac is Director of Library
Services .

Ellen Schiff is Professor of French and
Comparative Literature. Her particular
interests are in contemporary drama and
ethnic literature.